Professional notes by Craig Johnston
long-form, short-form, working drafts · since 2008
long-form, short-form, working drafts · since 2008
VOL. XIX · MMXXVI
143 NOTES IN PRINT
143 NOTES IN PRINT
Do Cross-References Help LLM Agents Complete Documents?
The agent found every page certified unreachable. Links cut search cost and keep working when search is off; they do not change what it reaches
→ Read this noteLatest note · folio diagram
flowchart LR E[Entry page] --> S[Search] S --> P[Read a page] P -->|graph arm: follow the edge| T[Target page] P -->|stripped arm: search the mention| T
mcp-data-platform exposes knowledge as wiki-style pages. An agent talking to it over MCP can search them and fetch them, and the pages can point at each other the way an internal wiki does. The server is …
Recent Notes
CXLII
Knowledge Pollution: Verification Displacement, Capability, and the Price of a Curation Gate
A wrong note that passed review spread only where the agent could have checked it, and only on Haiku 4.5: 16 of 24, against 0 of 24 on Sonnet 5 and Opus 5
2026-08-17
CXLIOn-Prem GPUs in a Boring Kubernetes Cluster
Adding your own GPUs to the platform with the NVIDIA GPU Operator
2026-08-12
CXLOne Cluster Across Clouds and Your Garage: Hybrid k3s With WireGuard
A single Kubernetes cluster spanning cloud regions and your own hardware, encrypted over the public internet
2026-08-10
CXXXIXWhat Happened to the Blockchain Chapter
Why the chapter is cut from this rebuild, and where tamper-evidence lives in 2026
2026-08-08
CXXXVIIIServerless Without the Cloud: Knative on Your Cluster
Scale-to-zero functions you own, after OpenFaaS moved the good parts behind a paywall
2026-08-06
CXXXVIIWrite-Heavy and Always On: Cassandra and Scylla on Kubernetes
Running Cassandra and Scylla on K8ssandra and the Scylla Operator after Rook dropped its own
2026-08-04
CXXXVIEvent-Driven Object Processing: Bucket Events to Jobs
Object storage that triggers work, a self-hosted answer to S3 plus Lambda on your own cluster
2026-08-02
CXXXVAn Instrument for MCP Agent Studies
The harness behind two DOI-archived benchmark reports, and why a study premise can be killed in one working day
2026-08-01
CXXXIVA Multi-User Data Lab: JupyterHub on Your Platform
Self-hosted notebooks for the whole team, on Keycloak SSO, wired to the lakehouse and every data source you own
2026-07-31
CXXXIIIIoT Ingest You Own: MQTT With Mosquitto on Kubernetes
Lightweight device messaging into the platform, bridged to Kafka, with the Mosquitto 2.0 change the old guides miss
2026-07-29
CXXXIISee the Whole Platform: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and OpenTelemetry
Self-hosted observability for everything you built, on the open standard instead of a per-host APM bill
2026-07-27
CXXXIWhen Do Agents Use Stored Knowledge?
A benchmark that killed its own hypothesis: strong models re-derive what they can check, and a weak model trusts a stale note over the evidence in front of it
2026-07-26
CXXXCilium: One eBPF Data Plane for Networking, Security, and Encryption
The CNI that replaced Weave Net, kube-proxy, and a hand-rolled WireGuard overlay with a single component
2026-07-25
CXXIXcontainerd Without Docker: the Runtime Under Your Cluster
The container runtime the kubelet actually uses, and how to configure and debug it now that the Docker shim is gone
2026-07-23
CXXVIIIDoes a Semantic Knowledge Layer Make an Agent Measurably Better?
A reproducible benchmark: 42.7% to 98.7% on knowledge-trap questions, and a platform that learns from empty
2026-07-22
CXXVIIGitOps: Git as the Source of Truth for Your Cluster
Argo CD and Flux, the deployment half the 2020 book left out, with manifests reconciled from a repo you own
2026-07-21
CXXVIBuild Images Inside Your Cluster, Without the Docker Socket
Rootless container builds in CI with BuildKit, and where supply-chain guardrails belong
2026-07-19
CXXVYour Git Forge Belongs on Your Cluster: Forgejo
Self-hosted source, CI/CD, and a registry, on the lightweight fork that left its for-profit parent
2026-07-17
CXXIVThe Agent Gateway to Your Platform: mcp-data-platform
An Apache-2.0 MCP server that gives frontier models access and grounded context to everything you built
2026-07-15
CXXIIIA Data Catalog Your Agents Can Read: DataHub
Metadata, lineage, and a business glossary over the whole platform
2026-07-13
CXXIISelf-Hosted BI with Apache Superset
Dashboards and SQL exploration over the lakehouse and Postgres, a Tableau replacement on the platform's SSO
2026-07-11
CXXISelf-Hosted Integration with Apache NiFi
Visual dataflow and ETL on your own cluster, instead of Workato and the iPaaS vendors
2026-07-09
CXXSelf-Hosted SSO with Keycloak
One login for every user-facing tool on the platform, instead of renting Okta or Auth0
2026-07-07
CXIXYour Own Snowflake: A Trino and Iceberg Lakehouse
SQL analytics over open table formats on the object storage you own
2026-07-05
CXVIIISelf-Hosted S3 with SeaweedFS
S3-compatible object storage for the data lake, backups, and the lakehouse
2026-07-03
CXVIIA Search Layer You Own: OpenSearch on Kubernetes
The index for the platform, on the Apache-licensed fork of Elasticsearch
2026-07-01
CXVIKafka Without ZooKeeper: KRaft on Kubernetes with Strimzi
A real-time event backbone, without the separate ZooKeeper ensemble to operate
2026-06-29
CXVWhen Your Tools Lie to the Agent
I drove my own platform as a real client and told it to find every place a tool said one thing and did another. A case study in MCP SDLC.
2026-06-28
CXIVA Database You Own: Postgres with CloudNativePG
High-availability PostgreSQL on your own storage, without the managed bill
2026-06-27
CXIIIWhere Tribal Knowledge Goes
An insight an analyst shares mid-session becomes a reviewed, signed-off change to the catalog rather than vanishing when the conversation ends.
2026-06-26